President Robert H. Wright's Chapel Talks: Evolution and Darwinism
Chapel Talks were given six mornings a week from 9:30 to 10:25 and typically consisted of a reading from the Bible followed by Robert H. Wright's thoughts regarding the passage or some other moral instruction for the students, along with any news, schedule changes, or other announcements.
The following are excerpts are from a series Chapel Talks given between October 10 and 22, 1925, following the "Scopes Monkey Trial" which had occurred earlier that year in July. Wright's position was that evolution is an unproved theory, not an evil; scientific truth cannot hurt religion; and that religion and evolution occur independently of each other.
This and other speeches may be found in Record Group CH1050, Series 2, Subseries 1, Box 1, Folder 4, in the University Archives.
Citation for this Chapel Talk: Wright, Robert H. "Evolution and Darwinism," October 1925, CH1050-2, University Archives, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC.
Chapel Talk: Evolution and Darwinism
By Robert H. Wright
Speech excerpted from talks given on October 10, 21 and 22, 1925.
Many of you are here for the first time from home and your parents, no doubt, are very uneasy about you for fear you will be ruined with evolution. Well, it won’t hurt you.The little bit we have, such as it is, won’t hurt anybody. The church is all torn to pieces on the question of evolution and the church hasn’t even touched the thing they are talking about. They are talking about Darwin and they don’t even know that Darwin was trying to explain evolution and not to teach evolution. They don’t even know that much about it, much less the fundamental problems that underlie much of this fuss about it. . .
What is evolution? You know there are people in the world today who are afraid of the word. I am going to talk to you girls just a little bit about it because I feel that it is a public duty. The world is afraid of that word today. There are people, good people, in the world who honestly believe if you believe in evolution there is positively no saving your soul on this earth, that you are gone, that it is absolutely the work of the devil, and they honestly believe it.
Certain men, years and years ago, noted that there were changes taking place in the vegetable kingdom and in the animal kingdom, that flowering shrubs and plants were changing, and that by working with them you could improve them and make them better . . . that the farmer by making close observations could develop something better than what he had. They noted the changes . . . and spoke of these changes that were taking place as improvements, or evolving something better, or evolution. . .
There came a man along and noted these changes. That man did not have a thing to do with it, but he happened to be called Darwin, and he got up a theory about these changes. He attempted to explain all the changes that had taken place. He advanced a theory and that theory is called Darwinism. He believed that when you run these changes back that there was just one little protoplasm and that man came from this low order.That is the thing people are talking about today and calling evolution. It isn’t evolution at all; it is an attempt to explain. That is all.And that is the thing that the churches and leaders of good people are actually fighting about today. . .
Darwinism isn’t anything in the world but a theory to try to explain what evolution is and it is a theory that has never been accepted by scientists, much less by theologians. Now, there are scientists who would tell me that I am entirely mistaken, he would say, "I accept it," and there is another one who would say, “You are right, I don’t,” and that is where theory has been from the beginning. One scientist has accepted it and another has rejected it. We do know this, that they have not been able to prove it. Darwin’s theory was to take these changes and look back, keep looking back until you find one little life cell. He is going back a long time to do that. I don’t know how many centuries and I don’t know how he worked out that from one little cell everything that has life has evolved. Darwin did not know whether that was so or not.It was just a theory. It is trying to unify the thing, that is all. Well, in working it out, they decided that man came from the next lowest order of animal, which is an ape, or the monkey family, and so they talked about man as the descendent of the monkey. I don’t know, maybe we did come from monkeys. The point I want you to get is that this theory is an attempted explanation of evolution, and it is today taken as evolution, and that is a mistake. The theory has never been generally accepted.
Now we have taken it on as a religious question and we say that the Bible teaches something to the contrary, that if you prove that Darwin’s theory is correct, then all of our religion is thrown away, it is ruined, it is absolutely destroyed. Now, those folks who take that position are just as bad as those folks who follow this monkey theory through and through. These religionists are carrying the theory, that is all. You mean to tell me that if you can establish a truth that it will destroy God’s word? No, it could not destroy God’s word because God’s word is the truth, and this part that we call the Bible is just part of the record, that is all. It does not contain it all. It is a part of it. It is the part they found and preserved. I don’t want anybody to have the kind of religion that can be destroyed by finding the truth. Why, it is God’s truth that makes us free, and this Bible was not written to teach us science or geography . . .
